April, 2019 archive
The Art of the Con, Lies and Lying Liars Dept. 0
Scott Martelle considers Donald Trump’s pervasive prevarication and posits a postulate:
It’s an entire ecosystem.
Follow the link for his reasoning.
Slap Schtick 0
Steven M. tries to make sense of right-wing logic.
The New Overseers 0
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the spread of an Amazonian tyranny of quotas in the workplace. A snippet:
- At the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, housekeepers can’t go home until they clean a predetermined number of rooms, even though, housekeepers say, rooms vary in cleanliness depending on factors like length of stay and whether guests declined service during their stay.
- At retail chains, workers say they have to convince a certain number of customers to share their email addresses or open store-brand credit cards, or else face a cut in their work hours.
- UPS uses sensors to track its drivers’ stop times, backup speeds, and seat belt use. The company is not allowed to fire workers based on these numbers but only because the Teamsters, the union that represents UPS drivers, fought for that language in their contract.
Selective Deception 0
Daniel R. Stalder explains that context matters.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness is essential to family harmony.
“She got out of the bed, walked into the living room and that is where we found her,” Brown said.
Investigation revealed that her brother-in-law, Travion Marell Williams, 29, had been handling a gun in the carport of the house when it went off, Brown said. . . .
Brown said the shooting is being investigated as an accident.
The NRA will likely argue that, had she been packing, this would not have happened.
QOTD 0
Dorothy Sayers:
He (Lord Peter Wimsey, working under cover in advertising–ed.) had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.
Sayers, Dorothy, Murder Must Advertise, in a double volume with The Five Red Herrings
(New York: Doubleday, publication date uncertain), p. 458.
Deadly Fascination 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., wonders about Republicans’ fascination with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Addressing Republicans, he writes:
The latest example began when one of your rank and file, Rep. Sean Duffy , took aim at the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez’s wish list of social, economic and policy goals to stem the impact of climate change. He called it “elitist.”
She responded forcefully. “You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?” she said. “Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids have their blood ascending in lead levels. …Call them elitist.”
More Mean for the Sake of Mean 0
Afterthought:
It occurs to me that the Trumpettes think everybody’s a crook because that’s the world they live i–oh, never mind.
Freedom of Screech 0
In The Kansas City Star, Melinda Henneberger points out the extreme and illogical ends to which Republicans will go to ensure that right-wing trolls get to dine freely.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness is a family affair.
The bullet is said to have traveled through the grandfather’s left hand and struck the grandson in the leg.
